Adventures With Her Boys

Replacements

The batchers had the ship navigating it's way through hyperspace after making their escape from Saleucami. Echo and Tech, as always, were focused on piloting the Havoc Marauder. Ryla sat near by, drawing in her sketch book.

"What are you up to kid?" Hunter asked coming to her.

"I'm just drawing" she simply replied keeping her eyes on her paper with a smile.

"Oh really? You wanna let me have a look?"

"Sure, it's not quite done yet but it's close enough." She handed her book up to him. He smiled with surprise.

"Wow, that's quite the work kid," he said, it was a sketch of Cut and Suu's house and their farm property, "you remember what all that looks like?"

"Yeah, I guess." He handed her sketchbook back to her and grabbed a metal box and opened it up. He handed her some food out of it.

"Here Ryla, chow time."

"Thanks, how are the rations right now anyway?"

"Well, we're gonna have to figure out the best place to make a stop soon for a supply run. Rations are low right now so we'll be limited on how much we all can eat for just a little bit."

"Okay." Wrecker came down seeing Hunter had the food out.

"Alright, munch time" he said excitedly. He took his rations from Hunter and ate it fast.

"Hit me again."

"That's all for now Wrecker, rations are low."

"You can have mine," Ryla then piped up, holding hers up to him. He was about to take it but Hunter stopped him.

"Woah, woah, woah. Ryla doesn't even have her own place to sleep yet, she's still bunking with Tech. You wanna take her food too?" Wrecker thought for a second, he could see Hunter's point.

"Oh, right. Nah, it's okay kid, you keep it. You probably need it more than I do."

"Okay then" she replied going back to her drawings. He turned his attention back to Hunter.

"I guess I'm still not quite used to having a kid around 24/7 yet."

"Well none of us are, but she's not complaining. She's happy with us." Suddenly the lights around the ship turned off.

"Hunter, the lights went out again" Ryla pointed out.

"Yeah, I noticed kiddo" he said, "Echo, the lights cut out again, I thought you fixed them."

"Yeah, add it to the list again. The ship got hit hard when we fled Saleucami. Several systems have been glitching ever since. Repairs would go faster if I had some help," he then glared at Tech for a second.

"As soon as I finish building this scanner" Tech assured, "Testing the functionality of our inhibitor chips takes precedence."

"I thought you said they were defective."

"A theory that this device will be able to prove. Besides, the ship-wide diagnostics report indicated that no critical systems were compromised." As soon as Tech said that, with no warning the ship began shaking really hard and got jerked around slightly from side to side then felt like it was sky-rocketing downwards. Everyone was thrown off guard. Alarms started blaring and emergency lights began blinking at a constant rate.

Ryla didn't like the looks of this. She had never been in a ship for as long as she had with the batchers before, which meant she had never been caught in an in-progress crash landing before so it began to give her some anxiety.